And they were both Muslims.
The co-pilot’s cellphone was searching for service which means that it could have been turned on when the plane was diverted a half hour earlier before he died and then connected with the tower on Penang as they flew by.
The real question is why they would be flying so low that cellphones onboard would connect with a cell tower — unless the pilot did it deliberately so that he could make a call.
The senior pilot was the one signing off and thus most likely the one at the controls when diverted. The co-pilot was on his rookie flight and thus probably overwhelmed by it all and taken advantage of by the old-timer.
Early on the IGP said that this was more than likely someone on the plane seeking insurance/settlement payoffs and that makes more sense than Muslims killing Muslims with a Muslim plane in a Muslim country.
The pilot’s political party was about as close as you could get to a secularist one, so I don’t see why he’d want to work with AQ to commit an act of terror.
Also - while the story seems to change from day to day - initially there was comment over the fact that it was the co-pilot’s voice that was recorded as giving the sign off or the last recorded words. Not a lot was known about the relatively new co-pilot, whereas the pilot had been flying for years, seemed to have been well-known and liked, etc.
Personally, I think the co-pilot probably overwhelmed the older pilot and forced him to fly someplace, then killing him once they got where they were going. Or maybe they crashed and were all killed before they could reach the intended destination.
It is certainly odd the way the Malaysian government keeps changing their stories, though. I think they probably knew what was going on and were trying to figure out what to do during the five hours between the notification from Vietnam that the flight had never entered their airspace and the time when they acknowledged that there was a problem. But who knows?
It’s an intriguing mystery and almost almost seems unreal, which I guess is why we’re so fascinated by it.